High Elf cavalry is excellent imho. Reavers are fantastic light cav, and Dragon Princes are top of their class. Silver Helms are kind of middling and need more of a home, they’re good for chasing off skirmishers and charging archers, that sort of thing.
After winning the short campaign as empire, I thought I’d continue the long campaign. Now I’ll have to give it up. My friends the dwarves own half of the world and I’d thought we were close allies. On closer inspection I realized that at some stage they had dropped our alliance and we only had a non-aggression pact. The campaign relies on you having allies possess points of the map if you don’t own them. Even though we were shoulder to shoulder taking out chaos, dark elves, high elves (yeah, sorry about that one but I had to make a choice) and all the other major contenders, the dwarves now refuse to ally with me. Close friends or not I guess the AI makes a hard decision not to ally with foreign nations after a certain benchmark of power is achieved. I don’t feel like reconquering half of the known world again.
Also, I’m beginning to feel that allowing us to colonise any terrain type on the map is a backwards step. I used to like the fact that there would be certain provinces that I could never settle- it made me feel that certain alliances made better sense because we had no reason to fight. Now, I colonise everywhere, even the shittiest areas on the map just to prevent my allies from getting too strong. It’s painful. You know when you’ve offended the Emperor when he puts you in charge of the garrison at the Altar of Storms.
Question: Anyone know if you’ve lost the campaign if someone else completes the ritual first? I mean I know there’s a final battle that follows which I assume if you win will stop that race from completing (either temporarily for forever), but what then happens to your ritual efforts, can they continue?
I’m playing as Dark Elves and it’s taken more time than I liked to get a base of operations going from confederation, and meanwhile the high elves in particular have become pretty powerful and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to set them back enough between now and the last two rituals (they nearly have started the 4th).
Started to make me consider what my options are at this point.
From what I’ve read from people who have experienced it, if someone else completes the ritual first you have a few turns to teleport to a final battle with them. If you win, they can’t pursue the vortex further, though their faction isn’t wiped out or anything. If you lose, game over. You can keep going after the vortex objective assuming you don’t lose the battle, and you won’t have to worry about that specific race completing it again.
Assuming you can cobble together one powerful doomstack by that time, the campaign is apparently pretty difficult to lose unless someone else finishes the last ritual and you forget to use the quest log to teleport to the “final battle” before it expires.
I have a feeling you’re right…but I’m going to be petulant an demand that it work!
Really, 300% larger unit sizes makes for some…epic fights. yes epic is an overused adjective, so with the aid of google I now propose that my fights were:
ambitious, heroic, long, grand, monumental, vast, Homeric, Miltonian
but I’ll disable the mod and see what happens. :(
I believe @MisterMourning is correct.
That said, I was in a similar spot in my Skaven campaign, with the Dark Elves starting the final ritual long before me. The thing is, as they get to the later rituals, their empire is more spread out. I was able to disrupt the final ritual by sending an army to a far-flung ritual site and razing it.
So can anyone explain this Mortal Empires bug to me? I thought it was internet nonsense, but I just read the beta patch notes. I’m just playing ME as Empire right now, and I don’t have any problem with other races not fighting Chaos, in fact Archaon is almost done and I hardly did anything.
The ritual system is a broken mechanic. It doesn’t matter if you lose the race, since you can win an easy battle to nullify the winner. Stopping individual rituals doesn’t matter either, because they still accrue ritual resources as normal and can just redo them. They lose nothing from failing the ritual, so never spend money on intervention armies.
Is it possible to get a win condition and close out the campaign if you have someone else complete the final ritual, you then defeat them in the final battle and after that you either take over the requisite number of provinces to win through domination or complete the ritual yourself? Or does this series of events somehow break the victory condition making it impossible to “win”.
Btw, If I stop others from completing the ritual while continuing to work on it myself why is that not a viable strategy, I don’t follow you on that piece. And by interventions I’m not talking about spending money on them, I’m talking actual armies I’m sending to move in and start to permanently disrupt their efforts and start taking over territory.
Btw, I agree this does feel incomplete, wonder if they plan to flesh it out at all, probably not if I had to guess.
Thanks Mister! I’ll be sure as the ticker gets close to keep at least one army well appointed for just such a mission.
Yes, you can still win that way. My point is that stopping a ritual doesn’t slow anything, they can simply redo it. Conquering a meaningful amount of their territory does slow them of course, but the nature of the map makes it tough to do that too much. The sheer size of It, I mean.
Yeah, I like the larger size of the map, makes things feel more dynamic, but it also makes stopping these rituals hard, at least in the way I’m attempting to do it where I recruit stacks and send them off to enemy territory so far away the logistics are problematic. What I’ve decided to do is work on taking what they’ve failed to defend and spread from there, taking over whole provinces if necessary, developing them and using that as a recruitment base of operations. Needless to say that takes awhile, possibly longer than it will take them to complete the ritual.
I think if/when I play DE again I’m going to expand towards the high elves specifically to make it easier to reach them and then confed the closes other DE near the lizards to help with them. Those appear to be the two big challenges. Skaven are there too, but they’ve not been pushing the ritual as hard, probably got someone they’re dealing with local keeping them distracted.
I’m playing as Empire a bit, but the same thing has happened twice, and made me want to restart.
Beastmen under One Eye passed through several other provinces, left them alone (undefended provinces too) and beelines just for me, and did a number on me.
I recovered.
And then the same thing happened with some Orcs.
They quite literally passed through neutral (to me) provinces for the express purpose of messing me about.
That’s not fun.
Playing as the High Elves, you get to see your Trading Partners’ territory. So, I’ve been able to see that I am not the only target for Chaos. I think a spawn will have a distinct target, and ignore nearby nations. Some poor Southern Kingdom is getting slaughtered by Chaos forces similar to the one’s I defeated. It’ll be interesting to see where they go after they’ve wrecked their current target.
I’ve read that others have seen them move on to the neighbors after their initial target is destroyed.
Just build the minor settlement garrison upgrades that add walls in every minor settlement. The primary metric the AI uses when determining when to attack is vulnerability, and whatever income you might lose from building those walls is going to generally be a wash with the averted sackings/razings/random war declarations when the AI decides you are vulnerable. It’s a pretty revenue neutral way to avoid massive frustration.
Is this on sale anywhere?
Nowhere reputable (aside from the 10% off for monthly subscribers at humblebundle)
Showing 20% off at Bundlestars re-badged site for me, though it’s targeting a region-locked AU version based on my IP so may be different for others. Use code FANATICAL10 for extra 10%.
Thanks! FANATICAL10 won’t stack though. 20% ($14.40 off $71.99 CAD) will have to do.
I stand corrected! Bundlestars is legit, even if their new name is idiotic.